Locating Death

Timing

As is the case with Sean Bell, Trap, and the Highbridge fire, memorial murals are often the last step in the commonly drawn-out process of services, rallies, hearings, etc. I followed these three cases thinking that I would catch a memorial mural like the ones in the previous posting being painted. As it turned out, days, weeks, even months after the deaths, no murals (in the “traditional” and/or “popular” style) went up, though I was told explicitly that they were being planned. My initial disappointment and sense of failure in capturing the most crucial few hours in a memorialization process led me to consider why there was such a significant lag time between death and wall painting. What I learned from this gap made me look at the others walls I found throughout my research very differently.

It is not uncommon for cultures to have social norms attached to the timing of grieving processes. For instance, in Japan, the difference between the “newly dead” and the “settled dead” is forty-nine days exactly, thus memorial services are performed forty-nine days after the person’s death in order to catalyze the transition. In Jewish tradition the tombstone is erected only after the year of mourning--shanah. What is it about memorializing someone that demands time? This question begs another: what is the difference between the makeshift memorials and the painted murals? How do each of these mourning rituals play different roles? The space in between these two forms of memorials gives them meaning. As if this transitional time were a backdrop against which the walls show up, the significance behind the murals came into focus for me best by studying their absence.

When someone dies, especially violently or abruptly, a makeshift memorial goes up first. As revealed by recent cases in this paper, these are made of decomposable objects like flowers, papers, candles, and stuffed animals. Often exposed to the elements, these walls are not supposed to be permanent. At the same time, it is uncommon that anyone dares to take them down. Consequently, the makeshift memorials blanket in snow, bleed with rain, bleach via sun, and blow away in the wind. Their decomposition is saturated with meaning. It would have been insensitive of me to ask family and friends of the deceased what the significance of the deterioration of their makeshift memorials was. Even without asking outright, however, I came to understand these walls as sites of place making and identity-creation. They seemed to be places for expressing grief, more for those in mourning than for the one gone. Almost everyone who walked by one of these new memorials stopped to read the small notes and re-light a candle that blew out. Even the notes themselves, although usually addressed to the deceased, could be interpreted as intended for other mourners. That the walls usually stay up until nature breaks them down tells me that where there is active grief (which I define as pre-acceptance-of-the-loss-phase), there is a makeshift memorial.

Cultures all over the world, especially Catholic ones, mark the sites of the newly dead with similar memorial shrines. In fact, the practice in North America was probably imported by Puerto Ricans. These temporary markers give people a physical location upon which to focus their grief and prayers. Of course it is noteworthy that the shrines are in public. Although grief is often a private process to the extent that it is a different experience for everyone, these temporary memorial walls bring family, friends, and strangers together to recognize loss by framing it socially. Michael Anderson, a bereavement anthropologist, broadly suggests that grief is a socially constructed process. I deduce that individual people and communities at large cope with high death rates among their family and friends by grieving more publicly than those who are forced to grieve less. In other words, I do not think that memorial murals proliferate in the neighborhoods that they do simply because Catholic memorial rituals “rubbed off” on these communities —I suspect that public grieving is a strategy for people to continue living when many people around them die (or go to jail) young.

What happens in the time between the makeshift memorial deteriorates and the memorial mural goes up? Mourners ready themselves; they begin to accept their loss. Once again, the timing of this memorialization ritual is more for the mourners than it is for the deceased. To depict a loved-one in paint on a large surface is to finalize their absence, which takes serious emotional preparation. Lady Pink suggested to me that some families are never ready to see their loved one’s face on a wall like that—watching their faces peel and fade can be like watching them die over again. If and when the mural does go up, what is behind that paint?
Painting the dead’s face on a wall places them somewhere other than here. This may seem obvious at first, but depicting the person larger than life on a two-dimensional surface renders them present in one sense and simultaneously absent in another. As opposed to the photographs of the deceased that are often put up on the makeshift memorial walls, the painted images are even further removed representations of the real people. Many walls emphasize in words that the deceased will never be forgotten, but the very creation of the wall is usually a marker that they are beginning to be, which is to say forgotten as they used to be and transformed into an image. This is a very different existence.

Urban ghosts live behind the paint of these memorial murals. It may seem far-fetched, sensationalist, and/or dramatic, but numerous artists, community members, and memorial scholars have hinted at their existence. Chico expressed regret after having painted so many memorial murals in the same neighborhood. He even painted over many of them because he thought it was getting “creepy” with “so many dead people on the walls.”

Tara Mack, a former employee of Groundswell, a community murals non-profit in central Brooklyn, undertook a project with youth from the area to understand memorial murals. In the summer of 2004 she lead nine teenagers in an investigation of the stories behind these murals throughout their borough. They put together an exhibit, Gone But Not Forgotten, to share their experiences and findings with the public. In the title and content of their exhibit, the teens evoke the idea that the deceased live on through the murals put up for them, but after having viewed the same murals and interviewed many of the same people, I would have titled my own show less optimistically. I understand why they chose their words as they did—the murals certainly remind family, friends, and neighbors of the life of the memorialized and in that sense, they are not forgotten. But one layer underneath the memories that they evoke, the walls actually signify the end to the active part of the mourning process.

From the minute the mural is finished, it begins decaying, fading, and peeling. The mural’s lifespan directly relates to those mourning. Of the many murals I have come across, I have never heard of one that was touched-up or fixed. Candles may be lit near it, flowers may be placed by it, but no one touches the wall itself. I asked Melvin Delgado, memorial mural scholar, about this phenomenon and he replied, “I’m philosophical about the fact that when they start peeling, people move on…the wall has fulfilled its function, helped make a transition, and that’s fine.” Though the mourners may have transitioned, what is left has been termed by multiple artists and residents as “graveyard neighborhoods.” The images are always watching; their eyes never close; they lurk on building corners in the night. These memorial murals bring present the absent and by so doing blur the distinction between either.

Memorial murals’ significance depends on one’s vicinity to them. For outsiders and insiders alike, the walls humanize victims of ghettoization caused by institutionally discriminatory planning, policies, and practices. For non-community members like myself, the walls contextualize urban statistics and theories on death, violence, and inner-city decay. But for community members themselves, memorial murals re-write space and history; by bringing memories forward and having them fade again, memorial murals mirror life in that they have a birth and a death of their own. At some point everyone must face that death is part of life, but some are forced to face this wall sooner than others.